Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Continuing on from my post about Optimal Layout I also tried out Divvy (version 1.2.3) for more efficient window management on Mac OS X. My work setup is a MacBook Pro with an external display and Spaces enabled. An important goal is to achieve keyboard only window control.

Divvy is a very simple app. It essentially enables you to divide the screen up into a virtual grid and snap the current window to a region within that grid. The other major feature is the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to particular regions, enabling you to position and size the current window to one of your predefined regions with ease. There is also an option to use the keyboard shortcuts to move the current window to another display, which I find quite useful.

To tile all the windows on the screen in a particular layout requires shifting the focus to each window to position and size it. If your Divvy shortcuts correspond to where you want the windows than this whole process can be done fairly quickly, without touching the mouse/trackpad. Having said that, I would love to define a layout on the Divvy grid and with a keyboard shortcut arrange all windows on the current screen into that layout.

I have Windows XP running in a Parallels VM in Coherence mode and Divvy does not seem to work with the Windows windows. Some applications (such as Activity Monitor) also have restrictions on window size that Divvy can't change.

Over the days I was trialling Divvy on my work MacBook Pro, I found myself missing it on the Mac at home. For USD$14 and a license that supports use on multiple Mac's, it is good value.